Misplaced Trust Research Articles

TRUSTED MACHINES? MACHINE LEARNING, MORE-THAN-HUMAN SPEED AND DEAD LABOR IN PLATFORM CAPITALISM

Decision making machines are today ‘trusted’ to perform or assist with a rapidly expanding array of tasks. Indeed, many contemporary industries could not now function without them. Nevertheless, this trust in and reliance upon digital automation is far from unproblematic. This paper combines insights drawn from qualitative research with creative industries professionals, with approaches derived from software studies and media archaeology to critically interrogate three ways that digital automation is currently employed and accompanying questions that relate to trust. Firstly, digital automation is examined as a way of saving time and/or reducing human labor, such as when programmers use automated build tools or graphical user interfaces. Secondly, automation enables new types of behavior by operating at more-than-human speeds, as exemplified by high-frequency trading algorithms. Finally, the mode of digital automation associated with machine learning attempts to both predict and influence human behaviors, as epitomized by personalization algorithms within social media and search engines.
 While creative machines are increasingly trusted to underpin industries, culture and society, we should at least query the desirability of increasing dependence on these technologies as they are currently employed. These for-profit, corporate-controlled tools performatively reproduce a neoliberal worldview. Discussing misplaced trust in digital automation frequently conjures an imagined binary opposition between humans and machines, however, this reductive fantasy conceals the far more concrete conflict between differing technocultural assemblages composed of humans and machines. Across the examples explored in this talk, what emerges are numerous ways in which creative machines are used to perpetuate social inequalities.

Why Cryptosystems Fail Revisited

In the paper “Why Cryptosystems Fail”, Ross Anderson ponders the question about why cryptosystems really fail. Obviously, there may be weak crypto-algorithms, too short key lengths and flawed crypto-protocols. However, these were not the main reason why cryptosystems failed. Anderson discovered that the problem had more to do with misplaced trust and misconceptions of the threats the systems faced. Now, more than 25 years later, it seems prudent to revisit the question of why cryptosystems fail. We investigate the original paper, and evaluate to what extent the situation is similar today.

Industrial Relations and the Tragic Flaw

Anyone familiar with Shakespeare and his tragedies would have heard about the ‘tragic flaw’ of his heroes. All his tragic heroes—Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet and Othello—catapulted towards their tragic end because of a tragic flaw: vaulting ambition in Macbeth, misplaced trust in King Lear, indecisiveness in Hamlet and green-eyed jealousy in Othello…. This article is an attempt to respond to the question of whether industrial relations practice is also characterized by a tragic flaw which significantly undermines its potency. The data for the article comes from published newspaper reports related to industrial relations incidents some of which involved avoidable workplace violence and tragic fatalities. The article analyses these industrial relations incidents in relation to previous studies and draws insights related to the root causes constituting a tragic flaw conceptualized as the ‘morphology of volatility’.

Screening Prophetic Machines: Preemption, Minority Report, and the Problem of Multiple Endings

“Screening Prophetic Machines” argues that director Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report (2002) stages inconsistencies in the ideological fantasies of prophetic inevitability and preventive action that sustained the George W. Bush administration's post 9/11 policy of preemption, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine. It observes that the film hyperbolizes this policy through the science-fictional tropes of the “prophetic machine,” which fuse preemption's speculative logics, traumatic affects, and excessive responses with contemporary media, screens, and surveillance to figure the American War on Terror and its ideological foreclosure of alternative futures. While acknow-ledging these parallels, however, this essay complicates criticism that proposes Minority Report inadequately critiques or even uncritically reproduces Bush-era ideology. Instead, it locates Minority Report's politics in cinematic form, claiming that the film's multiple possible endings suggest an array of possibilities for both narrative and prophetic closure that, when understood to be in tension, subvert assertions of preemptive certainty. Drawing from Fredric Jameson's work on utopian fiction, this essay thus examines how preemptive discourse and cinematic form converse in the film, and ultimately contends that Minority Report, because of its resistance to narrative closure, redirects attention from metaphysical discourses of fate and inevitability to the potential dangers of misplaced trust in interpretive authority.

Trustworthiness appraisal deficits in borderline personality disorder are associated with prefrontal cortex, not amygdala, impairment.

BackgroundBorderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is associated with sensitivity to signals of interpersonal threats and misplaced trust in others. The amygdala, an integral part of the threat evaluation and response network, responds to both fear- and trust-related stimuli in non-clinical samples, and is more sensitive to emotional stimuli in BPD compared to controls. However, it is unknown whether the amygdalar response can account for deficits of trust and elevated sensitivity to interpersonal threat in BPD.MethodsFacial stimuli were presented to 16 medication-free women with BPD and 17 demographically-matched healthy controls (total n = 33). Participants appraised fearfulness or trustworthiness of the stimuli while BOLD fMRI was obtained.ResultsThough BPD participants judged stimuli as less trustworthy compared to controls, trustworthiness did not correlate with amygdalar activity in either group. Trustworthiness correlated with prefrontal regional activity in the insula and lateral prefrontal cortex. Prefrontal BOLD activity while appraising trustworthiness was smaller in BPD compared to controls, and the size of the reduction was proportional to each participant's response bias.ConclusionsNeural substrates of trustworthiness appraisal are associated with the lateral prefrontal cortex and insula, not amygdala, suggesting that untrustworthy stimuli do not elicit a subcortical threat response. Current models of BPD and its treatment may need to include a focus on improving impairments in frontally mediated trustworthiness appraisal in addition to amygdala- driven emotional hyper-reactivity.

Democratic innovations in Serbia: a misplaced trust in technology

ABSTRACTThis article compares the results of three projects from Serbia, which share the assumption that the power of information and communication technologies (ICTs) can improve communication between the government and the citizens, and increase, to a limited extent, citizens’ participation. Using interviews and document analysis, it investigates the intended objectives and actual results of the projects. The key findings are that none of these projects can be unequivocally seen as a success, although they fail in different ways and to the various degrees. These results will primarily contribute to the underdeveloped body of knowledge about democratic innovations in Eastern Europe, but will also help to identify the factors of success (or failure) of this type of technologically-based democratic innovations.

Behavioral Adaptations to Lane Keeping Systems: Effects of Exposure and Withdrawal.

A driving simulator study was conducted to evaluate the longitudinal effects of an intervention and withdrawal of a lane keeping system on driving performance and cognitive workload. Autonomous vehicle systems are being implemented into the vehicle fleet. However, limited research exists in understanding the carryover effects of long-term exposure. Forty-eight participants (30 treatment, 18 control) completed eight drives across three separate days in a driving simulator. The treatment group had an intervention and withdrawal of a lane keeping system. Changes in driving performance (standard deviation of lateral position [SDLP] and mean time to collision [TTC]) and cognitive workload (response time and miss rate to a detection response task) were modeled using mixed effects linear and negative binomial regression. Drivers exposed to the lane keeping system had an increase in SDLP after the system was withdrawn relative to their baseline. Drivers with lane keeping had decreased mean TTC during and after system withdrawal compared with manual drivers. There was an increase in cognitive workload when the lane keeping system was withdrawn relative to when the system was engaged. Behavioral adaptations in driving performance and cognitive workload were present during automation and persisted after the automation was withdrawn. The findings of this research emphasize the importance to consider the effects of skill atrophy and misplaced trust due to semi-autonomous vehicle systems. Designers and policymakers can utilize this for system alerts and training.

WITHDRAWN–Administrative Duplicate Publication: Industrial Relations and the Tragic Flaw

Anyone familiar with Shakespeare and his tragedies would have heard about the ‘tragic flaw’ of his heroes. All his tragic heroes—Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet and Othello—catapulted towards their tragic end because of a tragic flaw: Vaulting ambition in Macbeth, misplaced trust in King Lear, indecisiveness in Hamlet, green eyed jealousy in Othello and so on. This article is an attempt to respond to the question of whether industrial relations practice is also characterized by a tragic flaw which significantly undermines its potency. The data for the article come from the published newspaper reports related to industrial relations incidents some of which involved avoidable workplace violence and tragic fatalities. The article analyses these industrial relations incidents and draws insights related to the root causes of what has been termed as the ‘morphology of volatility’.

It takes one to know one: exploring patient dialogue on rosacea web-based platforms and their potential for significant harm

Background: Rosacea is a non-curable skin condition, leading patients to turn self-management options from web-based platforms. Self-management can be dangerous possibly under-reported.Aim: To discover the extent of online material and determine the potential for harm influenced by rosacea internet sources.Material and methods: Material analyzed included search engines, apps, YouTube, forums and Facebook groups. As Facebook and forums were most active, they became the core focus. A passive ‘fly on the wall’ approach allowed observation of user posts and their content.Results: Three broad categories of dialogue were identified: prescribed medications, non-prescribed remedies and, most commonly, posts aimed to elicit emotional support. From this, positive and negative influences were identified. Negative influences were divided into four domains: physical harm, financial harm, emotional harm, and detrimental influences on patient-doctor relationships.Conclusions: Rosacea patients may be susceptible to rely on peer-generated information. Forums can have detrimental outcomes, primarily due to lack of monitoring and the potential for misplaced trust between fellow sufferers, encouraging others to try potentially harmful alternative remedies. Lack of monitoring allows the spread of inaccurate information, which can result in harm. Medical practitioners should be aware of trending online dialogue and self-treatment remedies to facilitate patient safety.

The double-edged sword of learning from disasters: Mortality in the Tohoku tsunami

Learning from natural disasters is predominantly regarded as beneficial: Individuals and governments learn to cope and thereby reduce damage and loss of life in future disasters. We argue against this standard narrative and point to two principal ways in which learning from past disasters can have detrimental consequences: First, investment in protective infrastructures may not only stimulate settlement in hazard-prone areas but also foster a false impression of security, which can prevent individuals from fleeing to safe places when hazard strikes. Second, if disaster events in the past did not have catastrophic consequences, affected individuals do not take future events sufficiently seriously. As a consequence, learning from disasters is a double-edged sword that can prevent large scale damage and human loss most of the time but results in the worst case scenario when a disaster occurs at an unexpected scale and public preparedness measures fail. We demonstrate the devastating impact of misplaced trust in public preparedness measures and misleading lessons drawn from past experience for the case of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. Our paper contributes to the literatures on ‘negative learning’ and ‘hazard maladaptation’ by demonstrating that a lack of past experience with tsunami mortality in a municipality substantively increases mortality in the Tohoku tsunami.

Chinese Workers and the Law: Misplaced Trust?

Chinese Workers and the Law: Misplaced Trust?

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Papers of the Harmony Society:

ABSTRACT Among archivists and manuscript collectors, the term “replevin” commonly describes efforts by government archives to recover public records that are in private hands. At times, such efforts can provoke friction, raising questions about the line between public and private property rights. This article chronicles an atypical replevin case in Pennsylvania, one that focuses on the struggles over the ownership of papers of a private origin, but which became government property with their transfer to the Commonwealth in 1937. This is a custodial history of a collection of papers documenting the Harmony Society, a religious separatist society once located in western Pennsylvania and in southwest Indiana. It is a story that involves a former Harmonist, a scholar, misplaced trust, and recovery that highlights the complex psychology of ownership.

Trust Promotes Unethical Behavior

Trust is critical for our cooperation and effective working relationships, but trust also enables exploitation and unethical behavior. Prior trust research has disproportionately focused on the benefits of trust, even though some of the most egregious unethical behaviors occur because of misplaced trust. Targets of exploitation often overweight the wrong trust cues and are exploited by people who either opportunistically or strategically take advantage of trusting targets. We call for future work to explore the critical link between trust and unethical behavior.

Damage to the insula is associated with abnormal interpersonal trust

Reciprocal trust is a crucial component of cooperative, mutually beneficial social relationships. Previous research using tasks that require judging and developing interpersonal trust has suggested that the insula may be an important brain region underlying these processes (King-Casas et al., 2008). Here, using a neuropsychological approach, we investigated the role of the insula in reciprocal trust during the Trust Game (TG), an interpersonal economic exchange. Consistent with previous research, we found that neurologically normal adults reciprocate trust in kind, i.e., they increase trust in response to increases from their partners, and decrease trust in response to decreases. In contrast, individuals with damage to the insula displayed abnormal expressions of trust. Specifically, these individuals behaved benevolently (expressing misplaced trust) when playing the role of investor, and malevolently (violating their partner's trust) when playing the role of the trustee. Our findings lend further support to the idea that the insula is important for expressing normal interpersonal trust, perhaps because the insula helps to recognize risk during decision-making and to identify social norm violations.

Fourth Amendment Fiduciaries

Fourth Amendment law is sorely in need of reform. To paraphrase Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence in United States v. Jones, the idea that people have no expectation of privacy in information voluntarily shared with third-parties — the foundation of the widely reviled “third-party doctrine” — makes little sense in the digital age.In truth, however, it is not just the third-party doctrine that needs retooling today. It is the Fourth Amendment’s general approach to the problem of “shared information.” Under existing law, if A shares information with B, A runs the risk of “misplaced trust” — the risk that B will disclose the information to law enforcement. Although the misplaced trust rule makes sense as a default, it comes under strain in cases where A and B have no relationship of trust and the only reason that A shares information with B is to obtain a socially valuable (and practically indispensable) service. In such cases, I argue that the doctrine should treat B as an “information fiduciary” and analyze B’s cooperation with law enforcement — whether voluntary or compelled — as a Fourth Amendment search.The argument develops in three parts. Part I demonstrates that the Court has already identified two settings — if only implicitly — where fiduciary-style protections are necessary to safeguard constitutional privacy: medical care and hotels. When A is a patient and B is a doctor, and, likewise, when A is a guest and B is a hotel manager, the Court has been reluctant to apply the “misplaced trust” rule. Rightly so: the principle is mismatched to the underlying relationship. From there, Part II fleshes out the normative argument. Put simply, we do not “trust” information fiduciaries, in the everyday sense, at all. So it makes little sense — normatively, or even semantically — to speak of trust being “misplaced.” Rather, the information is held for the benefit of the sharing party, and its use should be constrained by implied duties of care and loyalty. Finally, Part III lays the groundwork for determining who are “Fourth Amendment fiduciaries.” The Article concludes by exploring various practical metrics that courts might adopt to answer this question.

Exploitation of Humour in Kayode Ariyo's "The Misplaced Trust" and "A Bright New Day"

The effect of humour in literature has of recent times attained a cynosure, carving out such a decent class for comedy. The knowledge of this nascent trend of development has not eluded budding creative writers who seem to be slugging it out with tragedy in literary works. Ariyo's meticulous and intelligent exploitation of this element has not left him out of the league of those who have used it to the latter. Abinitio, a general overview of humour: surrounding concepts and theories, drawing from available literatures, is given. Thereafter, the paper attempts to x-ray closely, how the concept of humour has been exploited in drama, specifically basing it on Ariyo's duo. It then goes on to analyze the effects of the model humour in Ariyo's ‘The Misplaced Trust’ and ‘A Bright New Day’; after which a conclusion is drawn on the concept of humour exploitation in the works. The paper further reveals how humour relieves tension, induces laughter and rest of mind which bring out the emotional, psychological and clinical state of people’s mind.

Ashes to Ashes by Melissa Walker (review)

Reviewed by: Ashes to Ashes by Melissa Walker Karen Coats Walker, Melissa. Ashes to Ashes. Tegen/HarperCollins, 2013. [336p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-207734-9 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-207736-3 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10. Callie has always dulled her pain over losing her mother with daredevil stunts, and after her dad gives her a fast BMW, she’s simultaneously testing its limits and answering her cell phone when suddenly she’s broadsided and pulled into another dimension. She’s greeted by a set of glowing teenagers and informed that the most handsome one, Thatcher, is to be her guide through a way station on the road to the afterlife, an intermediary place from which she can help the living gain peace with her death. Thatcher is cautious and uptight, though, and Callie comes to prefer the company of a group of wild teen ghosts who have a different idea of the purposes and potentials of haunting, and who are using her mysteriously strong energy to possess humans. Callie may struggle to understand the reasons behind Thatcher’s rules, but readers will know immediately that she is making all the wrong choices with her afterlife, and this is what drives the suspense here: will her reckless decisions and misplaced trust lead her to a fate worse than—or at least subsequent to—death? A gentle didacticism aimed squarely at risky teen behavior pervades the story as Cassie learns to appreciate her father’s style of care, and her glaringly bad judgment will have readers shaking their heads; the lure of an after-death romance on top of [End Page 288] the tried-and-true premise of a teen’s imagining what will happen to friends and family after her death, though, will keep readers enthralled. Walker has chosen a perfect setting in Charleston, SC, where ghosts are a matter of course and steamy summers heighten the gothic atmospherics of teens courting danger. The ending is a bit of a tease—sequel, or just a wink to resist closure? Either way, readers will be intrigued by this entry in the paranormal romance genre. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

What's trust got to do with it? Revisiting opioid contracts

Prescription opioid abuse (POA) is an escalating clinical and public health problem. Physician worries about iatrogenic addiction and whether patients are ‘drug seeking’, ‘abusing’ and ‘diverting’ prescription opioids exist against...

Why so many structural changes in schools and so little reform in teaching practice?

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to explain how errors in policymaking contribute to the minimal impact that structural, curricular and cultural changes have made on teaching practice in American schools.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on the author's research legacy, the paper extends an historical analysis to explore and explain current dilemmas of change in schools and schooling.FindingsOver the last century, educational reforms have most often led to first order classroom change, represented by the development of hybrids of old and new teaching practices. Second order change at the classroom level has proven elusive. Factors at the policymaking level that explain the minimal impact on classroom practice include a misplaced trust in structural reform, an understanding of schools as complicated rather than complex systems, and the tendency not to distinguish teacher quality from the quality of teaching.Originality/valueThe paper proposes that the lack of impact of reform on classroom practice is explained in large part by errors in assumptions and thinking that policymakers commit, a focus seldom explored in research.

Beyond Genetic Tests and Biomarkers: What About Therapeutic Misconception?

Clinical trials are a vital part of the drug development process because they test the safety and efficacy of potential treatments. The primary goal of clinical trials is to obtain valid scientific data to answer research questions that lead to interventions to alleviate suffering. Consequently, protocols are created not to directly benefit the individual clinical trial participant but rather to ensure that the tested intervention meets safety and efficacy endpoints established by the drug sponsor and the regulatory agency (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or European Medicines Agency, for example). However, participants sometimes confuse the goals of clinical trials with medical care as they underestimate risks and overestimate benefits (Melo-Martin and Ho, 2008). This confusion is known as therapeutic misconception. As a partial remedy for this issue, deficiencies in the informed consent process need to be addressed. Therapeutic misconception can lead to unrealistic expectations and misplaced trust. For example, in phase I clinical trials, researchers want to determine the limits of drug dosage and the drug’s toxicity in humans (Cannon, 2006). Thus, low levels of the drug are given to participants in the early stages of the trials. As the study progresses, the amount of drug administered is gradually increased. It is unrealistic that a participant would expect to benefit from such a study because the dose that causes less toxicity has a smaller chance of being effective (Sankar, 2004). Additionally, the higher dosage can result in adverse events. Thus, although this phase is more about the potential toxicity of the drug, individuals still look for clinical benefits. Underlying these unrealistic expectations is the trust participants put in the researcher. Because of therapeutic misconception, many participants assume that the researcher seeks to improve the participants’ health. Consequently, many participants trust that the researcher will do what is best for them medically, regardless of the protocols’ stipulations. Because trust is integral to health care, this misplaced trust may result in the participant’s having difficulty confidently placing trust in other relationships with health professionals (Melo-Martin and Ho, 2008). Informed consent is ‘‘seen as the last defense against the risks of research, including those associated with the motives and practices of research’’ (Dixon-Woods et al., 2007). Researchers try to address these misconceptions during the informed consent process by discussing the research plan, risks, and benefits of a study. Attempts have been made to improve the consent process in order to eliminate therapeutic misconception. One study added a video to its consent process and tested the knowledge of the participant. Although the video did promote more discussion, it did not succeed in increasing a participant’s knowledge of clinical trials (Hoffner et al., 2012). Another study looked at participants’ perceived understanding, knowledge score, and factors that affect the consent process. The study found that discussions with physicians about the trial that take place before participants signed the consent document and last longer than 30 minutes did increase perceived understanding but did not increase the participant’s knowledge (Bergnemar et al., 2011). These studies demonstrate that examining the informed consent document and presenting information in different ways hasn’t reduced therapeutic misconception. Currently, the paradigm for informed consent is the transmission model: Communication is considered successful if the message is sent to a participant and is received. Social factors that affect whether the message is received, such as expectations or personal relations, are accounted for in the model as ‘‘noise’’ (Sankar, 2004). These social factors, often influenced by psychological, socioeconomic, and cultural factors, are important to consider in evaluating the consent process and should not be dismissed. Therefore, it has been argued that individuals do not make decisions based solely on reason; emotion also plays a role in the process (Charuvastra and Marder, 2006). Moreover, information read is not the only factor in decision-making. Other influences include trust, familiarity, and attraction (Charuvastra and Marder, 2006). Because emotions play a key role in an individual’s decision to join a clinical trial, the consent process needs to be modified to account for the interaction between emotion and reason. Perhaps explicitly defining the researcher–participant relationship in the informed consent process would discourage therapeutic misconception. Establishing a culture of participation in biomedical research might also alleviate this problem by both ‘‘normalizing’’ research participation and accelerating access to treatments for more diseases.